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Shana Hadi is an active night owl who enjoys green tea, pine trees, and flights of imagination (spurred from works like Ted Chiang’s “Exhalation"). When she’s not reading speculative fiction or attempting to write it well, she wonders if books are word sandwiches and their themes are different flavors of idea jam, and if that’s why they're so nourishing to the soul.

Lysley Tenorio’s debut short story collection, “Monstress,” astonishes with its brilliance and profound insight into the human experience. Tenorio also places emphasis on truthfully depicting the complications of American and Filipino identities, and the struggle to unite them with a hyphen. Through his melodic prose, Tenorio — also a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford —…

Over the weekend of May 4th and 5th, tens of thousands of readers gathered in downtown Berkeley, California, for the long-awaited Bay Area Book Festival. Hundreds of authors and speakers shared words of wisdom with eager fans in crowded auditoriums, with a free outdoor fair of rows of white-tipped tents showcasing publishers, literary organizations, authors…

Quoting Emily Dickinson, Helen Oyeyemi’s first short story collection, “What is Not Yours is Not Yours,” begins with the epigraph of “open me carefully” and swiftly delves into an exquisite unravelling of storytelling and reality. To great effect, Oyeyemi explores and broaches the boundaries of traditional narrative expectations, balancing fantasy and the surreal over a…

Sofia Samatar’s short story, “Selkie Stories are for Losers,” was a finalist for four major SFF awards in 2014 (the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and BSFA), but beyond this recognition, it offers an emotive portrayal of how we integrate stories in our lives during periods of loss. Samatar explores the old Scottish myth of the…

Continuing from yesterday’s paper, this article is Part 2 of Reads desk editor Shana Hadi’s interview with acclaimed speculative fiction authors Becky Chambers, S. L. Huang, and Yoon Ha Lee, who have written “The Vela” (a Serial Box Original story first released on Wednesday, March 6th) alongside Rivers Solomon; the concept was created by Lydia…

“Are you sure / That we are awake?” (4.1.178-179) As one of Shakespeare’s most iconic comedies, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” explores love and its potentially dreamlike manifestations, all while prompting us to consider the purpose of theater in bringing people together. On the eve of Duke Theseus’ wedding to Amazon queen Hippolyta, a fairy king…

Carmen Maria Machado’s debut collection of short stories, “Her Body and Other Parties,” oscillates between the horrifying and humorous, the fantastical and psychologically troubling, the uncanny and original. All eight stories feature women on the verge of becoming “madwomen in the attic,” challenging genre archetypes and traditional notions of femininity with inspiration from fairy tales,…